Trending News: Can Sleeping With Your Contact Lenses In Make You Go Blind? It Happened To This Guy

Why Is This Important?

Long Story Short

A man from Ohio has gone blind in one eye after sleeping in his contact lenses. This coincides with the news that more than 99% of contact lens wearers are misusing their lenses.

Long Story

Old age, Jigsaw and maybe a really angry cat are all things you expect might make you go blind. But your contact lenses? Not those faithful old friends!

Except misusing your contact lenses can, in very serious cases, lead to blindness. Case in point: it recently happened to Chad Groeschen, a 39-year old man from Cincinnati, Ohio. As reported by Buzzfeed, last month Groeschen was at work when his eyes started itching. At first he dismissed this as an allergic reaction, but a few days later his symptoms took a severe turn for the worse. Waking up one morning in excruciating pain, Groeschen found that he had almost no vision in his left eye.

After visiting a specialist, Groeschen was told that he had been infected with the Pseudomonas bacteria, most likely contracted by the bacteria getting underneath his contact lenses. “(The) contact kind of acts like a petri dish,” Groeschen told Buzzfeed. He is currently blind in his left eye.

Coincidentally, this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US published a report revealing that over 99% of US contact lens users put themselves at risk of eye infections by misusing their lenses.

Risky behaviour included keeping your contact lens cases for longer than recommended (82.3% of the people surveyed admitted to doing this), adding new solution to your case instead of emptying it completely first (55.1%), and, like Groeschen, wearing your lenses while sleeping (50.2%). As the CDC report notes, each of these actions have been reported by previous studies to raise the risk of eye infections by five times or more. Any lens wearers reading this with tingly eyes right now?

Carry a back-up pair of glasses in case contact lenses have to be taken out.

Oh, and people with ‘extended wear’ lenses can’t get away with skimping on these precautions or, indeed, sleeping with their contacts in — Groeschen’s contacts also happened to be extended wear lenses.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Are you going to tell me that I need to start flossing too?Disrupt Your Feed: I’ve been wearing my lenses for three weeks straight now.

Drop This Fact: Scientists have created telescopic contact lenses that can magnify images by up to three times.